


A Third of What He Was Missing

by scioscribe



Category: When Washington Was In Vogue - Edward Christopher Williams
Genre: First Time Foursome, Multi, Mutual Pining, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: You and Caroline and Tommie and Bob.Just once, Davy thought—just once he’d find it restful to sneak up on his feelings gradually, instead of having them ambush him all at once.  Nobody in their right mind could enjoy having verities of their life dumped on them the way their luggage had been dumped on the floor.
Relationships: Bob Fletcher/Caroline Rhodes/Davy Carr/Tommie Dawson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Third of What He Was Missing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seinmit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/gifts).



> I have your letter to thank for pointing me towards this totally delightful book. <3 Happy Yuletide!

At first, the music was too loud for Davy to hear the offer.

“What?”

Morton Reese raised his voice. “I said, if you need a rest from all your books, why not take my house in Anacostia for a week? You and Caroline and Tommie and Bob. I certainly won’t be using it; I’ll be lucky to even be in Washington for two days together the whole rest of the year. You remember the place, don’t you?”

“Of course. If I’m boggling at you, it’s because your offer seems too good to be true.”

“Well, in a manner of speaking, it is. The house loses most of its charm in the winter. There’s not much to do when you can’t enjoy the grounds. But if you’re only looking for a break—”

He was. He’d been going cross-eyed—and _cross_ , Caroline said—from nothing but books and moldering records by day and parties by night. It was mid-December, and Davy was convinced he’d had a headache since Thanksgiving at least. A week with just the four of them, the snow all around them white as unmarked paper he was under no obligation to study? It sounded like heaven.

He accepted the keys from Reese at once.

Reese had offered the house not only to the frustrated Davy, not only to him and to Caroline, and not only to him and Caroline and whatever guests they could conjure up—he’d offered it to him and Caroline and Tommie and Bob, a true superfluity of ampersands. Davy didn’t realize there was anything unusual about that—aside from the generosity of it—until they were on the drive down.

Caroline was wearing a long scarf that kept blowing forwards with the wind and tickling his cheek, and he earnestly pleaded with Tommie to restrain it for him. His shoulder, pressed up against Bob’s, was the only warm part of him. It occurred to him then that his marriage had wound up being very much like the four of them crammed in the car together, with no particular attention to who was steering, with Caroline exuberantly spilling over the edges, Tommie steadfast, and Bob an old comfort, no matter how devil-may-care he was. He hadn’t even considered going away with only his wife.

***

“Davy’s thinking about something,” Caroline said to Tommie. It was a stage whisper perfectly pitched to carry to them all, and Reese’s house was well-equipped to send it echoing all around.

Davy was, but he began to blush at the idea of admitting to it. He said instead, “Isn’t this intended to be my time off from thinking? Don’t tell me you’d still call me too much of a stick in the mud to know how to enjoy myself.”

“ _That_ I would never say,” said Caroline, with the sauciest smile imaginable.

“It would be a crime to go around spreading that kind of lie,” Bob said.

He put down one of their suitcases, and the tap of it against the floorboards sent a little cascade of snow down off the polished clasps. More snow was still in the upturned cuffs of Bob’s coat, an Army one too thin, in Davy’s experience, for this weather; they’d picked up heartier woolen ones off the Belgians to see them through December ’17, but Bob was in the faded old standard now, less warm but likelier to _draw_ warmth from other people. Davy could see the mended tear along the shoulder, which meant he knew this coat of Bob’s exactly. He’d stood close once, leaning there, and felt those stitches rub against his forehead from his brow to his hairline while Bob’s hands had worked him further down. In the days before the Belgian coats, they’d been glad to stay warm however they could. And after the Belgian coats, they’d gone on to find other excuses.

None of the snow, Davy noted, had melted yet. They’d need to get the fires going soon, unless they were planning on counting on his blush to warm the whole house. And they could, because it felt like he had stove-hot embers burning in his face.

He felt he was letting himself down somehow—he was supposed to be the creaky, grouchy mid-Victorian of them all, not someone dragging war into peacetime and modern, French ways of living—he’d certainly heard of them more often in France than anywhere else—back to an orderly home.

“What do you all like to do here?” Bob was saying. “You’ve all been before, haven’t you? I remember Davy wrote me about it—”

“Yes,” Caroline said, “you weren’t here yet then, were you? It was very rude of you, I think, when I know very well that Davy kept inviting you.”

“I could just as easily say the three of you were remiss in not coming up to Harlem to fetch me. I didn’t know what I was missing.”

“You knew Davy,” Tommie objected. Her warm hand suddenly lit upon Davy’s elbow, and he looked at her smooth rose-colored fingernails.

“You’ve got me there.” Bob lowered his head and kissed her, causing her fingers to lock slowly into the fabric of Davy’s coat, as she didn’t let go of him. “I knew a third of what I was missing. The rest I just had from Davy’s hearsay, and since I knew from the start that he couldn’t get enough of Caroline and had an idea he maybe couldn’t get enough of you either, I thought—”

“That he couldn’t possibly be an unbiased observer,” Caroline said. “And was he?”

“I would hope not,” Tommie said. “It isn’t what one looks for in a friend.”

Davy said, “I’ve got to object to being made sport of like this,” but none of them listened to him; he would have minded more if they had. He liked _pro forma_ objections, ones that established he was the same way he’d always been before the current rushed on and took him with it.

“I can’t know,” Bob said, “not being an unbiased observer myself.”

“Toasted marshmallows and roasted peanuts,” Davy said.

“Is that a peculiar kind of oath, godfather?” Caroline asked innocently.

“What we did when we were here last. We had a bonfire. Reese said that was off the table now, though, because of the weather—even if we wanted to be outside long enough to build a fire, we’d have trouble scrounging up enough dry kindling for it.”

“I’m perfectly happy toasting cheese and marshmallows and, most importantly, myself in front of the fireplace, assuming the _house_ kindling is dry.” Caroline abandoned her luggage in the hall and tugged Davy away from Tommie’s hand and into the parlor. “Make me warm,” she said, turning her face up to his. The winter light, pearly through the windowpane, silvered her, bringing out an almost sapphire undertone to her dark skin.

Davy said, “I don’t want to melt the snowflakes in your hair.”

“I don’t mind that. I’ll go out again over and over and get more of them.”

In that case, he was happy to oblige. That his thoughts were muddled did not keep him from doing himself credit, and he was passionate enough to wring several little gasps from Caroline before she pronounced herself and everything on her thoroughly and indisputably melted—even dissolved. It was a good thing too, she added, that he’d warmed her so thoroughly so quickly, because they did have to unpack, and Davy himself would grouch at her, wouldn’t he, if they didn’t get it done? Bob and Tommie had already vanished upstairs to their bedroom.

“You’ve awakened all kinds of passion,” Caroline said, looking at their door, which stood ajar. Her smile, Davy noticed, was less effervescent than usual—she’d been fine a moment before, making it seem like she’d dropped her satisfaction on the stairs. She looked anxious somehow.

He couldn’t say he was good at understanding her, since he had been such a slow study before. He thought the odds were good that if he tried it now, especially in the mood he was in, he’d knot himself up like a pretzel. He needed to either ask Caroline herself or, better, ask Tommie, who would already know—they were like extensions of each other—and who would be better at explaining it.

He couldn’t expect her to be thinking his own troubled thoughts. She was, despite her old flapper affectations, a nice, solid, even chivalric girl at heart, true blue like Tommie, and she’d been spitting mad about him spending any time with Billie Riddick. She wouldn’t want to share him. And since she’d given up cigarettes for him, and, hell, nine out of ten drinks, he didn’t even have an ounce of leverage to ask her.

As if having Bob or Tommie— _Bob and Tommie_ , some rebellious strain in him insisted—in his bed would be a vice that could be tucked into a cigarette holder.

And _was_ that what he’d started dreaming of? That was what he had to ask himself as he went on unpacking shirts and sweaters, feeling the cold crackle of wool underneath his hands.

_You and Caroline and Tommie and Bob._

Just once, Davy thought—just once he’d find it restful to sneak up on his feelings gradually, instead of having them ambush him all at once. Nobody in their right mind could enjoy having verities of their life dumped on them the way their luggage had been dumped on the floor. He could only glumly congratulate himself on thinking up the parallel, because he had no other comfort in the wings.

“What _are_ you thinking, Old Bear?” Caroline said. She was holding her scarf, the one that had tickled his chin and Tommie had restrained by wrapping one end around her wrist. She looked like she’d forgotten what was in her hands. Her wide, dark eyes were fixed on Davy, who didn’t have a good answer for her, even though he wished very much that he had.

He didn’t want to lie to her—he had a low opinion of husbands who lied to their wives when there wasn’t much occasion for it—so he said, “Something that would shock you.”

She tossed her head. “I’m impossible to shock.”

“Are you?”

“I’m like rubber—elastic and bouncy and back for anything, and thoroughly absorbent of the little shocks of the world.”

“Don’t listen to her, Davy dear,” Tommie said, coming into the room and kissing Caroline on the cheek. “She puts up a good front, that’s all.”

Bob had followed her in. “Little Caroline? A good front of what?”

“Of being pure India rubber,” Caroline said.

“Whatever you are, I’m quite convinced it’s pure,” Bob said. “No adulteration for you.”

“And no corruption,” Tommie said. “Especially now that she has Davy and his fists on her side.” She wrapped her arms loosely around Caroline’s waist and held her close. Her brilliant black eyes seemed to Davy to be even more searching than ever—revelatory, even, like the ink that made some crucial word visible. Thomasine Dawson Fletcher, giver of meaning.

There was no one he’d trust more to craft the story of them all, certainly, if Tommie could only tell him what she thought it was.

“The point is,” Caroline said, “Davy believes—quite mistakenly—that he can shock me.” Her voice had a peculiar throb to it, a throatiness Davy recognized only from more intimate moments than this one.

Bob’s smile was as warm as Caroline’s. “Shocks ought to interest us all a little less right now than fire. I’m shivering myself silly. And since Davy’s talked up all this roasting and toasting, I think it’s past time we got started.”

Davy was grateful just to have an excuse to get away from the question of shocks, so he led them downstairs and worked on starting a fire on Reese’s massive hearth. It was easily done, and soon after that, they were warming themselves by it.

Tommie’s skin looked especially fine in the firelight, and Davy ached to touch it. To pass a hand down just the length of her velvety arm, then down the satin of Caroline’s, then the suede of Bob’s—

Tommie was the only one of them he’d never kissed—at least not with anything more than a brother’s friendliness—but she seemed no more unfamiliar to him than the other two. It was new to consider them all together, and that was novelty enough to overwhelm anything else.

But at the same time, Davy felt like this was only new in the sense that he’d dug it up; Reese’s words had tugged like a dowsing rod, pointing him hard in the direction of his soul and dragging him along behind. It was an unearthly thought to entertain when all he wanted to be doing was shelling peanuts with his wife and friends. The nuts were slippery underneath his fingers and liable to squirt into the fire itself, where they put out a rich, smoky smell that made everybody hungrier than ever. He was roundly scolded for it by them all, but he didn’t see how he could have helped it, given what was on his mind.

He didn’t talk about what was on his mind, of course. They talked about other things instead—Genevieve and her coming wedding, Davy’s book, Caroline’s classes—and they burned their fingers on the roasted peanuts.

Tommie got up and some point, unasked, and started pouring drinks.

“You know where he keeps it!” Caroline said. She was lounging back against Davy by that point, and she looked to be enjoying her own sense of surprise. “Morton’s never told _me_. But you’re so good, Tommie—people always instinctively know they can trust you.”

“Given what a heavy hand I’m using to pour for us,” Tommie said, “Mr. Reese might wind up disagreeing with you in the end. We should all pitch in to buy him replacement bottles of whatever we drink.”

“Of course,” Bob said. “Davy and I will turn something up.”

“Ah, but Davy doesn’t approve of drinking,” Caroline said. She took a glass from Tommie and then further reclined, blinking up at Davy with exaggerated innocence. “He tried to frighten me out of it in the most aggravating way.”

“How?” Bob said.

“He said I could do as I liked!”

Bob laughed. “That _is_ aggravating.”

“I never ruled out drinking in this kind of company,” Davy said. “—Thank you, Tommie darling.”

Her smile conjured up dimples.

“I think,” Tommie said quietly, “that Davy is not half as old-fashioned as he pretends.”

Bob’s mouth curved right up against the rim of his glass. “Or more old-fashioned,” he suggested. “So old-fashioned he circles around again—you know all the right references for it, don’t you? Classical and Hebrew both.”

“Then there’s Sappho,” Tommie suggested.

Caroline stiffened slightly and pulled out of the circle of Davy’s arm, relocating herself to the edge of the hearth, where the firelight wouldn’t show her expression. “Davy’s interests, even his dustiest ones, are thoroughly American—and African, of course, because you can’t separate them anymore. That _is_ your thesis, Old Bear, isn’t it?”

“If I were making an argument instead of just recording history, I think it would be.”

“So you see,” Caroline said sadly, “it’s no good talking of Greece and—Europe.”

“No one mentioned Europe,” Davy said. He thought this had all gotten tangled in a way unfortunately characteristic of Caroline—why was it always so impossible to be straightforward? It was that feminine question again of going entirely around a thing to talk about its motivations. Except this time Bob was buying into it too, which made matters worse than ever. “And even if they had, I’ve been, as you know very well. Bob too.”

“That’s true, dearest,” Tommie said to Caroline. “Bob’s told me about what he and Davy got up to during the war.”

Davy couldn’t imagine that was true, but before he’d opened his mouth to say even the slightest demurral of it, Bob bumped shoulders with him and said, “Come on, Davy-boy, come help me scare up some marshmallows.”

He took Davy by the elbow and practically dragged him off to the kitchen, an operation which took longer than it might have, as Bob insisted on leading and didn’t know where the kitchen _was_.

Davy finally shook him off when they were alone in the chilly little room. “What gives, Buddie?”

“I told Tommie about us, Davy, you damn fool. That’s what gives.”

Even with it having been on his mind all day, Davy was so used to keeping mum on some things that he almost said, _What about us?_ Then he realized what Bob meant. He’d told Tommie _all of it_ , and right then, it didn’t seem to matter if Bob had painted it in broad strokes or gotten right down into the glorious muck of it—to Davy’s come drying on Bob’s thighs to Bob spitting into his palm and opening Davy up as quickly as he could. All of it with the smell of cordite in Davy’s nose. He’d wanted some rough-and-tumble pain when Bob took him; he wanted to feel something besides damp cold and war wounds and stinking terror.

“You told Tommie,” Davy said. Who could picture that conversation? It quickened his temper to even think about it. “Why would you do that? Don’t you know what a good thing you have with her?”

“Of course I know! I love her to pieces.” He took Davy by the shoulders this time; his gaze was so earnest it hurt. “You and me, we had a good thing too.”

“It was the war.”

“And then it was Harlem. Right up until you came here.”

“Where we both found the best women in the world,” Davy said quietly. What kind of strength of mind was he supposed to have, to go walking away from his best friend talking like this? “You’ve got to choose what you want in this life, Bob.”

“That’s your trouble,” Bob said. “You try to give up things that don’t want to be given up—that don’t _need_ to be given up.”

“You can convince yourself of whatever you want—”

“Tommie _knows_ , Davy. She knows, and she loves you too. And she knows what you are to me—dammit, she probably knows it better than you do. It’s what Caroline is to her, can't you see that? Now are you going to draw a line down between the four of us and say we’ve all got to stay on our right sides, or are you going to let everybody put their cards down on the table?”

It kept coming back to that. First the ambush, then the demand that he open up—well, he’d opened up for Caroline, in what he considered to be a pretty glorious fashion, and he could do it again. He could seize hold of a little flair. He might have been antique, but, like Bob had said, so was all of this, in one way or another—this wasn’t any new kind of mischief. Sappho, Achilles and Patroclus, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. He didn’t know how often it had made folks happy, but it had been done, and in every corner of the world. He could call it more sociology, if he wanted.

If this was poison, he had as much right to pick his own poison as anybody else.

“You and me,” Davy said slowly, “and Tommie and Caroline.”

“And you and Caroline, and me and Tommie, and you and Tommie, and me and Caroline—”

“You and Caroline too?”

“Sure, me and Caroline too. I love that little minx about as well as anybody on this earth.” Bob found the tin of marshmallows and ate one as it was, leaving a delicate trace of sugar on his lips. He kissed Davy, his mouth sweet and finely powdered. "All of us, Davy."

They went out to Tommie and Caroline, who were still sitting on the rug, huddled close enough to each other that the shapes of their dresses seemed to come in a single mass of wool and velvet.

It would be something extraordinary for them to all belong to each other.

He looked at the silk stockings that Caroline was wearing, at the smooth translucence of them over her brown legs, and he thought about those stockings already half-ruined by the snow, and still another late revelation came to him, this one wryer than the rest: they had all planned this. The three of them had somehow sorted it out without him, without Old Grouchy, and then waited to let him know what kind of happiness they’d decided on. Caroline’s silk stockings, so silly for the occasion, made this a planned seduction.

“I come bearing marshmallows,” Bob said, and Davy thought it was about the first time he’d ever heard Bob sound nervous. That was some consolation, anyway; he’d hate to be the only dull one, the only one who hadn’t rushed into this right out of the starting gate.

“And Davy?” Caroline said. Her voice was trembling. She took Tommie’s hand and squeezed it.

That taught him a sharp lesson. Poor Caroline and her Sappho, thinking he wouldn’t understand, that he’d judge her for being friends with Tommie the way he was with Bob! Thinking too, undoubtedly, that he would be happy to have his Caroline and his Bob and his Tommie—but not let her join in. Wasn’t he the one who ruled out her fun? Hadn’t she given up parts of herself for him already?

There was a little twist in his throat. “And Davy,” he said. “Davy brings himself—to lay that poor offering down at everybody’s feet.”

“Grandiloquent,” Bob said.

“But you don’t mean it, Davy, do you?”

“I mean—” So much for eloquence. “I mean the four of us together. I mean I want what all of you want. I don’t have enough practice at all this to say it any better than that.”

“Well, good,” Caroline said, coming to her feet. “I’ve told you once before that I’m not that kind of girl, and I don’t know that I’d like it if you were that kind of man. I _like_ my confessions a little stilted.” She snuggled up to Davy’s chest, reuniting him with the smell of Fleurs d’Amour, still enough to make his heart pound.

“Bob is smoother than me,” Davy said. “He’s a charmer.”

“I know, and you might know I judge him for it harshly. I’m not going to accept any of his protestations of love until he thoroughly proves his sincerity.”

“He will,” Tommie said. She put one arm around Caroline, and this time Davy saw it differently: he saw that Tommie didn’t hold Caroline the way Genevieve did. She held her with a lover’s tenderness, stroking her hand against the sweet curve of Caroline’s hip over and over again. “Bob’s very good at that, you know. And Davy—” She smiled at him and then actually lowered her eyes, almost bashful. “I can’t say I haven’t heard plenty about you from Caroline and Bob both.”

“Look at him blush!” Caroline said with familiar familiar delight. “I don’t know that I’ve ever scandalized him half that well.”

“It’s because he doesn’t expect that kind of thing from me,” Tommie said. “But it’s a special occasion, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Davy said. He liberated the tin of marshmallows from Bob. Right then he felt clumsy, too ordinary and real to be part of what felt like a living dream, but he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted some kind of courtship despite everything. “Let’s scrounge up some toasting forks for these before we—go on upstairs.”

So they sat around the hearth a while, with Tommie’s skirt spread out against his thigh, with Bob’s hand on Caroline’s ankle, with Caroline’s head resting on Tommie’s shoulder. They fed each other, more and more indelicately as the night went on—cool mouths closing around hot fingers. They burned themselves taking the marshmallows off the forks too soon. But it was hard to wait, or so Davy would later write in his diary—when it came to the sweetest things, even dusty mid-Victorians like himself turned out to be impatient.


End file.
